I would like to offer a very warm welcome Sandra Steiner who has very kindly offered a ‘blog exchange’. An inspirational woman in herself, her books have helped people all over the world, inspiring them to create happier futures for themselves through her work. Please take a moment to enjoy Sandra’s blog and follow her work. Sandra will be publishing my blog on her website today titled “The Madness of Authors” which is a little piece I think you will have fun with, so please, stop by her website and check out my latest blog!

CHERISH THE PAST – EXCERPT

PROLOGUE

Angie sighed. A small smile began to form as she recalled the moments that led up to this incredible feeling. Life was good. No, life was amazing. It hadn’t always been, but today at forty-six, it sure was. She had reached a good space in her life. She was content, in love, at peace with her past, and excited about her future. Tomorrow she was marrying her soul mate. She had nearly given up hoping she would find him. He had actually prayed that she would find him before his birthday. Or so he said, and she had no reason not to believe him.

As she sat on the beach with Candy watching the waves roll in, the memories of a lifetime came crashing in reminding her to cherish the past.

Twenty-nine years earlier

CHAPTER ONE

Angie woke with a smile on her lips, for the last time, in the room of her childhood. The sun was streaming in the window, and the curtains were billowing in the wind. Stretching and slowly opening her eyes, the first thing she saw was her beautiful gown of white. The exquisite lace veil was hanging beside it, and her white sandals were set out with them. Excitement surged through her. Today was their day. The first day of the rest of their lives. Just like most little girls, she had dreamed and planned her wedding day for years. She had been waiting her entire life for this moment. The wedding plans were made long ago; her dreams and desires of love would now become a reality.

Angie was not quite eighteen. In fact her high school graduation had been just the weekend before. At this moment though, she would rather not think about that night. Alex had disappeared from the grad party, and she had to get her mother to pick her up. She thought he had seemed overly upset the next day when she confronted him about leaving her there. It wasn’t like him to holler at her. Well, sometimes her imagination got the best of her.

Sandra Steiner back cover

Sandra Steiner front cover

ABOUT THE TRILOGY

The trilogy I have written portrays three incredibly strong women who are faced with difficult circumstances in their lives and the journey they went through to overcome them. Spring Island is a fictional place in which they all find comfort and hope in one way or another.

My purpose for writing these books was to offer hope for those who need it….inspiration to carry on in life. If they inspire only one person, I will have been successful.

Please watch for the first book to be released in July 2014 – Cherish the Past. Book Two – Live for Today – August 2014 Book Three – Dream for Tomorrow

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra completed a Bachelor of Education degree after high school and has been working for the last twenty years in the Accounting field. Becoming a published author has always been a dream. She is a proud mother and grandmother. She lives with her husband on Vancouver Island in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia Canada.

Since the death of her teenage daughter in 2004 she has inspired many to think positively and to live life for the moment. Over the years she has motivated many individuals to believe in themselves, and they have encouraged me to write and share my experiences. She is a strong woman who believes anything is possible if you believe in yourself.

She would like to thank everyone for all their help promoting her books!

This was a tough one! Not because I struggled to find 10, but rather more that I struggled to keep it down to so few! I have tried to mix it up a little: some modern, some not so with a view to keeping heavier books such as Ulysses by James Joyce out of the list (although still a jolly good read). So here goes. I thoroughly recommend the following “Top Ten Bucket List of Must Reads”

Tears in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Cider House Rules by John Irving

Animal Farm by George Orwell

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Ancient Evenings by Normal Mailer

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Lolita by Vladamir Nabokov

Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

I totally expect that you have read most of these but maybe one or two that you haven’t! Enjoy, my friends and followers and remember to ‘LIKE’ my Satinpaperbacks FB page, www.facebook.com/Satinpaperbackscom after all, Paulo Coelho did!!

This is Donna’s first book in eleven years, although previously scheduled for release in 2008, and her third award winning book. Early reviews from the US have praised the novel, with the trade publications Kirkus and Booklistboth giving starred reviews. Kirkus describes The Goldfinch as “a standout” while Booklist comments “Drenched in sensory detail, infused with Theo’s churning thoughts and feelings, sparked by nimble dialogue, and propelled by escalating cosmic angst and thriller action, Tartt’s trenchant, defiant, engrossing, and rocketing novel conducts a grand inquiry into the mystery and sorrow of survival, beauty and obsession, and the promise of art.” Stephen Kinghas also admired the novel writing “Donna Tartt is an amazingly good writer … it’s very good”

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a novel of shocking narrative energy and power. It combines unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and breath taking suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher’s calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is a beautiful, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

12 Point Book Club Discussion Notes

1. Donna Tartt has said that the Goldfinch painting was the “guiding spirit” of the book. How so—what do you think she meant? What—or what all—does the painting represent in the novel?

2. David Copperfield famously says in the first line of Dickens’s book,

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will beheld by anybody else, these pages must show.

Because of the many comparisons made between Dickens’s work and The Goldfinch, that same question could rightfully be asked by Theo Decker. What do you think—is Theo the “hero” of his own life? What, in fact, does it mean to be the “hero” of a novel?

3. Tartt has said that “reading’s no good unless it’s fun.”

The one quality I look for in books (and it’s very hard to find), but I love that childhood quality of gleeful, greedy reading, can’t-get-enough-of-it, what’s-happening-to-these-people, the breathless kind of turning of the pages. That’s what I want in a book.

In other words, a good book should propel readers from page to page, in part because they care about the characters. Has Tartt accomplished that in The Goldfinch? Did you find yourself rapidly turning the pages to find find out what happens to the characters? Does the story engage you? And do you care about the characters? If so, which ones?

4. How convincingly does Tartt write about Theo’s grief and his survival guilt? Talk about the ways Theo manifests the depth of his loss and his sense of desolation?

5. What do you think of Andy’s family: especially Andy himself and Mrs. Barbour? Are we meant to like the family? Is Mrs. Barbour pleased or resentful about having to take Theo in. What about the family as it appears later in the book when Theo re-enters its life? Were you surprised at Mrs. Barbour’s reaction to seeing Theo again?

6. Talk about the ways in which the numerous adults at his school try—to no avail, as it turns out—to help Theo work through his grief. If you were one of the grown-ups in Theo’s life, what would you do or say differently to him. Is there anything that can be said?

7. Many reviewers have remarked on Boris as the most inventive and vividly portrayed character in the book. How do you feel? Are you as taken with him as both Theo and book reviewers are? Talk about his influence over Theo—was it for better for worse?

8. Readers are obviously meant to find Theo’s father negligent and irresponsible, a reprobate. Are you able to identify any redeeming quality in him? What about his girlfriend?

9. Talk about Hobie and how Tartt uses his wood working and restoration as a symbol of his relationship to Theo. How does Theo disappoint him…and why? Theo fears he will, or already has, become like his father. Has he?

10. Tartt asks us to consider whether or not our world is orderly, whether events follow a pattern (which could indicate an underlying meaning), or whether everything that happens is simply random—like the explosion that killed Theo’s mother. What does Theo’s father believe…and what does Theo believe? Do Theo’s views by the end of the story?

11. The book also ponders beauty and art. Why is art so important to the human soul? What are its consolations…and what are its dangers? In what ways can we allow ourselves to be trapped by art or beauty? And HOW does this relate to the Goldfinch, the painting at the heart of this story— a painting of a bird chained to its perch and a painting that Theo clings to for 14 years.

12. What do you think the future holds for Theo? Why do you think Tartt left the book’s conclusion open as to whether he will end up with Pippa or Kitsy?

It’s the most extraordinary thing and it happened when I was least expecting it. A writer has emerged from Australia with all the poetry and beauty in her words that her country exudes by the bucket full.

Burial Rites

An unlikely topic in which to find such eloquence and beauteous flow, but it is here in the subject of the last application of Capital Punishment that took place in Iceland on January 12, 1830 that Hannah Kent has chosen to launch her debut novel.

The story is centred on the convict Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a farmhand and Friðrik Sigurðsson, a farmer’s son from Katadalur. Together they were convicted of the crime of murdering two men and for this; they were executed by beheading.

Grim must have been Hannah’s days as she researched the details of the execution methods most commonly used, such as burning at the stake, beheading and drowning. She would have delved into archives that in shivering detail would have described how men were more commonly beheaded or hung. That, supposedly-wayward women were lowered into the river directly next to the Law Rock itself with ropes, to either freeze to death or drown. Because Agnes was accused of killing her lover Nathan, the question of the choice of her execution hangs in the air like frozen stalactites; sharp as a hanging dagger, unanswered and so failing to plunge into the darkness and shatter the peace.

The structure is inspired. Agnes talks to you in the first person but the other characters in this gripping tale are written in the third person. The resulting affect is that you can feel, see and hear everything from all sides, all around you. Her skill is to be admired and thoroughly applauded. But more than this, it is the very words she uses that bring you to Agnes’ very soul in torment:

“The sagas I know by heart. I am sinking all I have left and going underwater. If I speak, it will be in bubbles of air. They will not be able to keep my words for themselves. They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lambs circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there”.

If you read anything this year then please, read this. Its hard subject is dealt with so sensitively and with such nurturing care that you will feel as if you are the one gifted with Agnes’ lost life and smile as you greet your day.